Electra (Murray Translation): Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Electra (Murray Translation), credited to Euripides, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Electra (Murray Translation) by Euripides. (Translated by Gilbert Murray.) Read in English by Expatriate Electra (the Unmated One) is eaten up with hatred of her mother Clytemnestra and stepfather Aegisthus for their murder of her father Agamemnon. Married platonically to a good-hearted but poverty-stricken old peasant, she longs for the return of her brother Orestes to help her wreak vengeance. Orestes finally returns and together they carry out their fated work, but find the result to be as tragically meaningless as the lust for vengeance had been poisonous. Strikingly different from Sophocles, who wrote his “Electra” with full sympathy for the divine ordinance of revenge, Euripides squarely blames the God Apollo for putting an evil commandment on the shoulders of the siblings. He also shows the tragic ambiguity of the entire situation, pleading a strong, emotional case for Clytemnestra and showing her vulnerable motherliness at the moment of her death. Deeper, more human psychologically than Sophocles or Aeschylus, Euripides is compared with good reason in the translator’s introduction to modern playwrights such as Browning or Ibsen. ( Expatriate)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Electra (Murray Translation)
• Author credits: Euripides
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 4
• Listed recording duration: 1:41:51

Catalogue topics

• euripides
• greek drama
• greek tragedy

Track guide

1. 01 - Introduction — 9:19
2. 02 - Part I — 30:39
3. 03 - Part II — 30:49
4. 04 - Part III — 31:04

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.